Words 2

These excerpts aren’t from any one ‘story’ but it follows my irresistible urge to try to describe what I was seeing and feeling almost 10 years ago.

OK. This is going to be a weird read …

Psychic ooze laminates a sex show with surgical precision captured only for several moments until it fades like ghostly camera flash ebbs. The mind stirs not unlike soup realising the TV is still burning away, sparks of multiple camera angles illuminate the dull walls and prick the corners of a weary eye – shit, I’ve done it again.

Click. The wretched sound waves reverberate back and fourth until settled. The once illuminated room fades as the light falls like loose wallpaper and the stark night bluntly closes in. I turn towards the TV now wrapped up like a sausage roll to watch the bogey-green coloured screen echo’s silently burn out. It’s now twelve o four and time to get some sleep.

Leith Walk wasn’t what it looked like when he caught the number 16 around 8am that morning. “If I remember”, he said, “there weren’t so many giant trees in Leith. I think I might have noticed that”.

A slight mist had descended that sat level with the buildings, the pavements and road lay shattered with huge thick trees shooting up into the sky almost disappearing into the darkness save a slight outline from the street lights that hinted at their true height.

The trees emitted an unusual humidity that reacted with the falling snow producing a thin shower of rain that rustled the leaves blending with the sounds of insects and the occasional squawk from a tropical sounding bird.

He stumbled through the rubble at the edge of this new forest amazed stepping over a fallen lamppost and watching a tamarin monkey leap elegantly from the window of a Domino’s Pizza joint onto a branch with its brazen maine then scuttle out of sight.

Maybe too strange. I’ve got a lot of that sort of thing lying around in one form or another, I guess it should stay there.